{"id":532,"date":"2026-07-30T16:46:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T16:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=532"},"modified":"2026-07-30T16:46:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T16:46:22","slug":"abdul-el-sayed-lost-in-2018-it-set-him-up-for-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=532","title":{"rendered":"Abdul El-Sayed Lost in 2018. It Set Him Up for 2026."},"content":{"rendered":"
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PONTIAC, MICHIGAN \u2013 On a balmy Sunday afternoon outside of the Pontiac Public Library, I was set to join Abdul El-Sayed and two of his staffers for a 30-minute ride between campaign stops. As we got into the Ford Explorer, a man approached the car and knocked on the driver\u2019s-side window. He had a reporter\u2019s notebook and started ripping out pages. At first, it seemed like he was a journalist trying to get in a final question. But when El-Sayed asked if he could help him, the man, still ripping pages out, mumbled that he was just sharing some thoughts on messaging. He handed almost a dozen sheets of paper to El-Sayed\u2019s driver before the SUV drove away.<\/p>\n

Read more Employers Stall Labor Contracts for Years. A New Bill Could Change That.<\/a><\/p>\n

The man wasn\u2019t, it turns out, a staffer or a journalist. He was a supporter. El-Sayed\u2019s staffers were ready to just pocket the notes, but the candidate wanted to read them. Politicians often \u201close touch with how people think about a particular issue and how it shows up to folks so when they give you this they\u2019re teaching you how [the issues] shows up to them,\u201d El-Sayed said, as he flipped through the dozen pages.<\/p>\n

That episode is comparatively new to El-Sayed, the unlikely front-runner in the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan. For years, he\u2019s been a health care technocrat and aspiring lawmaker, but only recently has he really gained the level of attention that the most prominent Democrats or Republicans get, which comes with representing a political wing of their party.<\/p>\n

This is El-Sayed\u2019s second statewide race. In both cases, he entered as the heavy underdog, a Bernie Sanders\u2013aligned candidate seeking public office. This time, as he seeks to replace outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, El-Sayed has increased his viability from highly improbable to likely Democratic nominee for Senate. Most public polls and some private polls (including one of the last internal polls from the now-aborted campaign of state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, according to a Democrat with knowledge of those surveys) show El-Sayed winning the primary. Most recently, a late-July poll has him up on U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens 46-36, with another 14 percent undecided.<\/p>\n

Part of this surge is thanks to El-Sayed\u2019s own populist skills: He\u2019s a gifted orator who has managed to attract the affection of progressive Democrats. Part of it has been Stevens\u2019s struggles to raise money or get comfortable in the spotlight, and McMorrow\u2019s difficulty carving out a lane. But whatever the reason, with less than a week until Election Day and over 800,000 Michiganders having already voted, establishment and normie Democrats are engaged in a collective mass panic and a frantic effort to keep El-Sayed from winning the nomination with whatever they have in their arsenal. El-Sayed\u2019s top surrogates have argued his nomination would send a larger message to the rest of the party.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody is watching this race!\u201d Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who traveled from Washington state to stump for El-Sayed, said during a rally on Saturday.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed\u2019s political trajectory began in 2018 with an ultimately unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign, after serving as a bright-eyed health director for Detroit. I profiled him for Politico\u2019s magazine during that primary. We were both young\u2014him 32, me 29\u2014childless, and recent graduates of the same college.<\/p>\n

Longtime political strategist for Barack Obama and others David Axelrod, who has praised El-Sayed as a candidate, often argues that politicians learn more by losing. So I asked El-Sayed what he learned, and what is different now?<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst of all, it\u2019s not about me,\u201d he said. \u201cIn 2018 I didn\u2019t understand enough that. Second, I just grew up. I was 32 and had never run for office in my life. I hadn\u2019t had my kids yet. Now I have two kids and a mortgage. The kids are eight and three. Your kids teach you a lot about patience which I know you know,\u201d alluding to how we both have daughters now. \u201cAnd the third is, I don\u2019t need you to agree with me on the critique, I just need you to agree with me on the outcome, on the solution. That\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to focus on.\u201d<\/p>\n

As El-Sayed has matured, as he\u2019s gained more supporters trying to rip pages out of notebooks to help him, as he\u2019s become more visible on the national scene, he\u2019s also had to shed some of the happy-warrior youthfulness that characterized his early years in politics. He\u2019s opted to run a more serious campaign, and with that comes all the seriousness of being a viable and iconoclastic candidate.<\/p>\n

I FIRST MET<\/strong> Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed in 2017. By then, he had already crafted an impressive r\u00e9sum\u00e9. We are both University of Michigan graduates and actually had some mutual friends on campus. Though we did not know each other personally, I had heard about an impressive student who was involved in the Muslim Students Association and played on the club lacrosse team. The Michigan Daily<\/em> did a story about El-Sayed and his wife being married while still in college.<\/p>\n

In 2007, El-Sayed delivered the student commencement speech for his graduating class. Former President Bill Clinton was the guest speaker, and after the speech the former president told El-Sayed he had an oratorical gift. Why would he go to medical school, Clinton wondered?<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. President, I don\u2019t know if you saw my name but it\u2019s got 11 letters in it\u2014and that\u2019s just my first name\u2014so I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s going to be possible for me,\u201d El-Sayed recounted saying. Even during the early years of Barack Obama\u2019s rise in national politics, it\u2019s understandable why El-Sayed would be skeptical of a political career.<\/p>\n

Instead he studied for two years at the University of Michigan Medical School, then received a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, where he was in the same class with Pete Buttigieg. (They have kept in touch over the years.) El-Sayed completed his Ph.D. in public health there and a separate Doctor of Medicine from Columbia University. But El-Sayed decided on public health rather than a conventional medical practice. After a year teaching public health at Columbia, he was tapped by Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, then a very powerful figure in Michigan politics, to come home and run the city\u2019s health department. But he would eventually catch the political bug.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed\u2019s 2018 gubernatorial campaign unfolded in a markedly different political landscape. Democratic candidates across the country were grappling with whether to support abolishing ICE (24 percent of the public supported abolishing ICE in 2018; now, 50 percent of Americans want to get rid of the agency). Obamacare was under threat, and while Bernie Sanders had run for president on a campaign of Medicare for All, the atmosphere was more about protecting what was in place.<\/p>\n

Sanders had established himself as the figurehead of an energized minority of very liberal voters. But contemporary liberal heavyweights like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hadn\u2019t experienced their upset victories quite yet. El-Sayed\u2019s association with the Sanders wing of the party marked him as more of a curiosity, as did his lack of experience while trying to become one of the youngest candidates ever elected statewide in a major Midwestern state. He and his team, many of them Sanders alumni, were young and less ingrained in the various organizations and political quarters of Michigan that a statewide candidate needed to win. He had little to no name recognition around the state, and a Twitter account with only a few hundred followers (it\u2019s now around 150,000).<\/p>\n

In the campaign, El-Sayed displayed some of the raw political chops that make him a serious political candidate today. His core message was largely the same: a more robust government presence in health care, free college tuition for students below a certain income threshold, and a higher minimum wage, as well as the poisonous presence of dark money in electoral politics. But he was caught between two approaches, alternately trying to be the next Barack Obama to Democrats who wanted that and the next Bernie Sanders to progressives who wanted that.<\/p>\n

If anything, there was too much policy. \u201cAt one point somebody called the campaign the best think tank in America,\u201d Max Glass, El-Sayed\u2019s longtime senior strategist, told me earlier this year. And his campaign lacked the catchy\u2014and sometimes annoyingly repetitive to those whose job it is to chronicle elections\u2014shorthand phrases on which winning candidates often ride to victory.<\/p>\n

Gretchen Whitmer ran on the slogan \u201cFix the Damn Roads,\u201d engineered after she had already sifted through senior staff. \u201c[Whitmer] was just hyper-focused on improving the lives of people in the state in ways that were measurable,\u201d Glass told me in the interview earlier this year. \u201cWhereas our campaign had these big lofty ideas of trying to create a state-level single-payer health care system for Michigan \u2026 Gretchen really focused down on \u2018what can I do today to make things better?\u2019 I hated it at the time but it was kind of brilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitmer, who had a long record as state Senate minority leader, was simply the more seasoned, better organized, and more disciplined candidate, and while El-Sayed briefly made some hay over Whitmer\u2019s father being the longtime president of Blue Cross of Michigan as he stumped for Medicare for All, in the end Whitmer won every county and 52 percent of the Democratic primary vote, followed by El-Sayed with 30 percent.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy did he lose? Probably money,\u201d one Democratic operative who supported Whitmer in 2018 said, pointing to Whitmer\u2019s money and name ID advantage. \u201cHe lost because he never held office before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, the operative said, there is \u201cincredible economic angst.\u201d If there was a rematch? \u201cGretchen vs. Abdul now? I wouldn\u2019t pick that fight,\u201d the operative said.<\/p>\n

EVEN THOUGH HE LOST<\/strong>, El-Sayed came out of the governor\u2019s race much more visible within the national Democratic Party. He would go on to appear regularly on CNN, write two books, and host a podcast which at one point was housed within the Crooked Media ecosystem, further raising his profile.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed remained active in Michigan government over those years, too, serving as health director for Wayne County from 2023 to 2025, allying with Wayne County Executive Warren Evans against Whitmer over a juvenile jail crisis. During the 2024 campaign, he was an outspoken Sanders supporter and, for a time, a member of the Uncommitted movement before ultimately endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in the final stages of the general election.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not like Abdul has been campaigning for a job these last eight years, he hasn\u2019t been,\u201d said Pontiac City Councilman Mikal Goodman, who knocked doors for El-Sayed\u2019s gubernatorial race and is backing him now. \u201cHe\u2019s been mainly doing the job that\u2019s expected of him both in the sense of being a health director, being a doctor who has strong political beliefs about a key issue and he also has been doing his job. And so I think that over the eight years people have come to see Abdul as \u2018oh yeah, he\u2019s with us\u2019 because he\u2019s been around.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Read: The progressives propelling Abdul El-Sayed forward in Michigan<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The 2026 Senate campaign has been much more muscular (literally and figuratively), focused, and sharpened. Riding with El-Sayed in late July, there were the same lighthearted moments and wide-ranging discussions. But there was a healthy dose of the phrases El-Sayed hammers relentlessly on the trail, at rallies, and every bit of campaign literature they publish: \u201cmoney out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for All.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time El-Sayed began running for Senate, presidential candidates like Buttigieg and Trump demonstrated how an everywhere-all-the-time approach to social media and podcasting was more effective than highly choreographed events and speeches. El-Sayed, Glass, and his team opted to emphasize the candidate\u2019s skills and comfort on podcasts, public appearances, and even more adversarial formats like Fox News, to raise his profile.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed\u2019s team embraced the candidate\u2019s self-described identity as a \u201cbro with a podcast\u201d and put him on weightlifting podcasts. Authenticity had become a priority for a swath of voters, as well as a fighting spirit. El-Sayed and his team leaned into both early on, even as the beginning of the Senate race was shaping up to be a three-way fight with two other, seemingly better-situated candidates.<\/p>\n

Michigan has always had a close and historic relationship with unions, something El-Sayed has purposefully cultivated. He earned the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, whose members found El-Sayed authentic when he pitched himself to them.<\/p>\n

Read more Louis Brandeis: The Empiricist<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s just that he\u2019s real,\u201d UAW president Shawn Fain told me in an interview. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t come off as robotic, unfortunately like a lot of politicians do, Republicans or Democrats \u2026 He\u2019s real and I think people relate to that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In particular, Fain added, members were impressed with El-Sayed\u2019s focus on not taking any corporate PAC money. \u201cLook, corporate PAC money is a big deal to us and when you\u2019ve got a candidate that\u2019s not taking it and you\u2019ve got a candidate that\u2019s telling you, \u2018yes, I take it but it\u2019s OK. I know a lot of people struggle with that,\u201d Fain said, alluding to El-Sayed\u2019s two initial rivals in the primary, Stevens and McMorrow.<\/p>\n

Stevens has depended almost entirely on outside money to prop up her campaign. The latest quarterly fundraising report showed the congresswoman had raised almost $12 million (less than El-Sayed or McMorrow) and spent a little more than $9 million. But outside spending in support of Stevens has surpassed $30 million and provided the lion\u2019s share of advertising for Stevens\u2019s candidacy. Some estimates have gone as high as $60 million of corporate interests and outside group spending to boost Stevens and stop El-Sayed.<\/p>\n

A good way for El-Sayed to exemplify the role of big money in politics was through his opposition to data centers, which this year has become a populist rallying cry extending beyond the liberal wing of the party. El-Sayed\u2019s campaign took a page from the early days of his late gubernatorial campaign and unloaded a series of intricate proposals for addressing data center construction and energy concerns. This campaign had figured out a way to direct El-Sayed\u2019s most wonky inclinations, without tripping up his overarching approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople really effing hate data centers,\u201d El-Sayed said at a recent campaign stop. \u201cThe trade-off here is hard to explain to the broader public and we\u2019re doing this in a deeply unregulated era. There is no regulation that is real.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s become apparent to El-Sayed\u2019s supporters and Michiganders in general is that this Senate campaign is much more focused, even if that means sacrificing some of the hopeful levity El-Sayed tried to run on last time for a graver maturity.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs someone who\u2019s a speechwriter you can sense when someone has a very distilled pitch for themselves and the issues were very clear and it still has a health care lean to it but he had a fuller agenda that encompassed government reform and corruption and obviously foreign policy,\u201d said Ben Rhodes, the former Obama speechwriter who co-hosted a fundraiser for El-Sayed\u2019s Senate race. \u201cYou can sense he\u2019s just locked in. He knows his own race. He knows who he needs to persuade, who he needs to mobilize.\u201d<\/p>\n

A FAVORITE LINE IN EL-SAYED\u2019S<\/strong> stump speech points to how Michigan is a complex state. It often eschews the flashier candidates for the more subdued backbenchers. Think former senators like Philip Hart or Carl Levin or Debbie Stabenow, or outgoing Sen. Gary Peters (whom El-Sayed and Stevens are competing to succeed). It\u2019s not lost on El-Sayed that Whitmer came off as less exciting during the 2018 gubernatorial race. The last Republican governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, leveraged his background as a certified public accountant into a successful campaign slogan: \u201cOne Tough Nerd.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, El-Sayed points out that Michigan barely went for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary before picking Donald Trump in the general election. Trump came within 200,000 votes in 2020 of winning the state three times. Michigan tends to be consistent in its inconsistency. It is part of the cluster of Rust Belt states that have become must-win for any presidential candidate. The state has industrial wastelands, but also real wealth in some of the richest suburbs in America. It has both rural and heavily urban and suburban pockets. Michigan also has one of the largest Jewish and one of the largest Muslim populations in the country, which makes things particularly tense when events in the Middle East drift into the national American discourse.<\/p>\n

Inside the state, though, Democrats say the political tectonic plates have shifted under voters\u2019 feet. Democrats largely shifted left even as some moderates have continued to dabble in Trumpism. Rashida Tlaib\u2019s victory in Michigan\u2019s 13th Congressional District in Detroit was an early bellwether. \u201cThe state has definitely become more liberal as far as the Democrats are concerned,\u201d Barry Goodman, an elected officer-at-large for the Michigan Democratic Party, told me.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed\u2019s national visibility as a Senate candidate really took off when he was endorsed by liberal Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. El-Sayed\u2019s rivals, particularly McMorrow, pounced on the endorsement and tied the candidate to some of Piker\u2019s most extreme language on foreign policy. But El-Sayed himself didn\u2019t recoil from Piker\u2019s support and instead went on to campaign with him. McMorrow sunk so badly after the exchange that she ended up dropping out of the primary.<\/p>\n

The episode revealed an important aspect of the Democratic primary electorate in Michigan or elsewhere. \u201cThe Hasan Piker situation was very interesting in that yes, he\u2019s very popular with younger voters and I think people were excited to see somebody who\u2019s willing to do the work of reaching those voters,\u201d Glass told me in an interview. \u201cFor us it was like, \u2018let\u2019s show people we\u2019re the only campaign willing to actually really go and have real conversations with some of these influencers that are having an impact with young voters.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the race but particularly after McMorrow exited, the primary has featured infighting and bitter attacks. The first time El-Sayed\u2019s viability and really the intensity of his support was on display was at the state Democratic Party convention, where supporters drowned out Stevens\u2019s speech with boos and jeers. El-Sayed soon after urged his supporters to resist the urge to embrace personal attacks.<\/p>\n

Those calls have ultimately failed to really materialize. Occasionally, El-Sayed has unintentionally made things slightly more difficult for himself, like when he accused Stevens of sometimes struggling to string sentences together, a comment that Stevens and her allies have used to argue that El-Sayed is a rank sexist.<\/p>\n

The campaign has only grown more negative as Stevens\u2019s discomfort and rank awkwardness with retail politics have gone viral online and her most outspoken supporters (usually some of the more centrist national Democratic figures) have amplified flimsy accusations of sexism, alleged financial chicanery, and disingenuous attacks about the candidate\u2019s education and medical degrees.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed and his team were expecting all of that plus a pile-on by establishment Democrats, especially in a cycle where Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), the current chair of Democrats\u2019 Senate campaign arm, opted to try and boost their preferred candidates in primaries. But it\u2019s hard to understate the degree of desperation El-Sayed\u2019s opponents within the Michigan political community feel about his possible nomination. Peters and Whitmer, his former foe, both opted to buck tradition and previous vows to stay neutral in the race and endorsed Stevens.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s partially driven by the larger fear that nominating El-Sayed would blow the Senate seat and risk a Republican takeover. There has been polling showing Stevens as more competitive against former Congressman Mike Rogers. Democrats are also still smarting from nominating a wild-card progressive candidate in the Maine Senate race only to see him collapse amid scandal, something the establishment has played up. But while there have been a few polls showing Stevens in the lead, the majority of public polling\u2014some of which is questionable\u2014has shown El-Sayed leading the pack.<\/p>\n

Stevens also has a reputation as a favored member of Congress among Black voters. The polling favorable to her shows her winning big among Black voters, and she spent much of the final days of the campaign trying to juice Black turnout in Detroit in her favor.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed\u2019s team did not expect the sheer depth of money the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was willing to spend to boost Stevens and attack him over his calls to limit aid to Israel over its handling of the war in Gaza. The campaign has turned that spending into a rallying cry, framing him as a David figure fighting a Goliath of outside spending, something that\u2019s resonated with voters in a cycle where the Democratic electorate is rabidly against outside interests and dark-money spending.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve built a guerrilla campaign,\u201d El-Sayed said to a group of former McMorrow supporters last Sunday, pointing out that the only way he\u2019s been able to withstand the outside money spent against him is because of the early efforts his campaign has made to build grassroots support.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed is used to dogged retail politicking. Glass stressed though that how he\u2019s gone about it in the Senate race reflects how he\u2019s approached this campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think this time around he\u2019s more focused on listening to folks. He\u2019s done 450 events all across Michigan. He\u2019s been to 110 cities,\u201d Glass told me. \u201cNobody has traveled this state as much as we have and listened to near as many people. And I think he\u2019s really trying to speak toward the emotional challenge that so many of us are facing in terms of what it means when you can\u2019t afford to make ends meet. Where do you put that anger?\u201d<\/p>\n

EL-SAYED HAS HAD TO CRAFT<\/strong> a concise and simple answer on Israel and Gaza, even as he\u2019s been relentlessly pressed by his opponents and in interviews with national press over whether he is pro-Israel or not. El-Sayed has avoided boiling his response down to something one-dimensional. Instead, he\u2019s come to say the premise is wrong and that, instead, the question is really about where voters want to send their tax dollars: abroad or to domestic priorities.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe frame this question in the interest of one foreign government, and I think any question asked to an American policymaker ought to be asked with respect to the frame of the public that that person serves, which is Michigan. So I just reject the frame of the question. I reject the idea that I should be asked about the interests of a foreign government when my interest should be in people in the state of Michigan,\u201d El-Sayed told me during our ride-along.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also made a point of stressing his respect for the Jewish faith while also arguing that the Palestinian people also deserve dignity and respect.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed has had to make it a habit of taking questions about Israel and Gaza and answering with a segue to domestic topics. At a rally with over 100 supporters on Saturday outside of Detroit, El-Sayed alluded to how often questions from national press have the premise that he or his position on Israel might be \u201cdangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI always wonder, like, why would you call someone like me dangerous? It\u2019s not like people who look like me have ever been called dangerous,\u201d El-Sayed said as he wound up a part of his stump speech. \u201cI\u2019ll just say this: Go ask a child who needed a pair of glasses in Detroit if I\u2019m dangerous. Go ask the folks who could not breathe because the smoke never stops spewing out sulfur dioxide. If I\u2019m dangerous, go ask the parents of kids who are going to schools that were leaded. If I\u2019m dangerous, go ask the people flooded in medical debt if I\u2019m dangerous. I think what they\u2019ll tell you is, he\u2019s the best friend you might have if you want government to work for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bringing in the other side of his pitch, on special interests controlling politics, El-Sayed wound up the crowd further. \u201cBut I tell you what, if you\u2019re AIPAC, I\u2019m pretty damn dangerous. If you\u2019re a Big Pharma, I\u2019m dangerous. If you\u2019re Big Tech and want to put a data center in your backyard, I\u2019m dangerous. If you\u2019re a big bank that wants to collude against us, I am dangerous. If you\u2019re a monopolist who wants to raise prices? I\u2019m dangerous. If you\u2019re Chuck Schumer, I\u2019m pretty damn dangerous. And I think it\u2019s about damn time we had Democrats who are willing to be dangerous for all the people rigging our politics against us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more A VA Medical Center Meltdown<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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PONTIAC, MICHIGAN \u2013 On a balmy Sunday afternoon outside of the Pontiac Public Library, I was set to join Abdul El-Sayed and two of his staffers for a 30-minute ride between campaign stops. As we got into the Ford Explorer, a man approached the car and knocked on the driver\u2019s-side window. He had a reporter\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[258],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-tagged-abdul-el-sayed-campaign-finance-congress-democrats-economic-policy-election-2026-haley-stevens-israel-palestine-mallory-mcmorrow-michigan"],"yoast_head":"\nAbdul El-Sayed Lost in 2018. 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